Preface

This manual introduces another interface to the MH mail system that is
accessible through the GNU Emacs editor, namely, MH-E. MH-E is
easy to use. I don’t assume that you know GNU Emacs or even MH at this
point, since I didn’t know either of them when I discovered MH-E.
However, MH-E was the tip of the iceberg, and I discovered more and
more niceties about GNU Emacs and MH. Now I’m fully hooked on both of
them.

The MH-E package is distributed with Emacs1, so you
shouldn’t have to do anything special to use it. Gnus is also
required; version 5.10 or higher is recommended. This manual covers
MH-E version 8.5. To help you decide which version you
have, see Getting Started.

If you don’t already use GNU Emacs but want to learn more, you can
read a built-in tutorial by starting GNU Emacs and typing C-h t
(help-with-tutorial). (To learn about this notation, see
Conventions.) If you want to take the plunge, consult the
GNU Emacs Manual,
from the Free Software Foundation.

If more information is needed, you can go to the Unix manual pages of
the individual MH commands. When the name is not obvious, I’ll guide
you to a relevant MH manual page that describes the action more fully.

This manual is available in both Info and online formats. The Info
version is distributed with Emacs and can be accessed with the
info command (‘info mh-e’) or within Emacs (C-h i
m mh-e RET). The online version is available at
SourceForge. Another great
online resource is the book
MH & nmh: Email for
Users & Programmers (also known as the MH book).

I hope you enjoy this manual! If you have any comments, or suggestions
for this document, please let me know.

Bill Wohler <wohler at newt.com>
8 February 1995
24 February 2006

Footnotes

Version
8.5 of MH-E appeared in Emacs 24.4. It is supported in GNU
Emacs 23 and higher, as well as XEmacs 21.4.22 and 21.5.31. MH-E is
known not to work with GNU Emacs versions 20 and below, and XEmacs
version 21.5.9–21.5.16. It is compatible with MH versions 6.8.4 and
higher, all versions of nmh, and GNU mailutils 1.0 and higher